He doesn’t listen. With one hand he cups his genitals and with the other he reaches and grabs her gurkha knife.
You little cunt. I’m gonna split you in half.
He lunges forward and she ducks and puts her hand out to divert the blow and the blade goes over her head, but she feels a quick iciness on her left hand and when she looks down she sees that the knife has taken off half of her pinky finger. The blood spills down her wrist and makes her hand feel slippery.
There’s no pain yet, just cold—but she knows to expect it later, so whatever she’s going to do, it better get done now.
She’s got her back to the window and he’s coming at her again, but when he raises the knife over his head to strike, her hands dart up and grab the wrist and twist it backward so his whole body falls forward facedown and then, still holding the arm up at an angle, she brings her foot down on it at the elbow and hears it splinter-snap like a wet tree branch.
Except now he’s wailing loud and guttural, all the blood driven up into his face and the tendons of his neck standing out hard and long.
Shush up, she says, trying to quiet him. Shush up now, people are gonna hear you.
But he keeps screeching, and she turns him over and slaps his face like you do with hysterics, but she supposes it’s not so much hysteria as it is excruciating pain that’s his current problem. So she looks for something to stuff in his mouth and finds the bra that Ruby got for her, which is padded and has some bulk to it, and she jams it between his teeth with her fingers.
Hush that noise, she says. Come on, hush it.
She puts her left hand over his mouth to hold the bra in place, and the blood from her finger streams over his cheek and into his eye and down into his ear. She kneels on his chest to keep him quiet and presses down on his mouth trying to leave his nose free—but something is wrong because in a minute he begins turning purple and convulsing and then he stops moving altogether.
She takes her hand away from his mouth and looks into his heavy-lidded eyes, which are already beginning to cloud over.
Doggone it, she says. Why do livin and dyin always have to be just half an inch apart?
She goes to the desk and takes a ballpoint pen from the drawer and puts the tip of it in his nostril and drives it upward sharp and hard with the heel of her hand to keep him from coming back.
Then she takes the elastic band from her hair and winds it tight around her pinky finger to hold the blood in and sits back against the window to take a breath.
She shakes her head.
I liked this place too.
4.
It’s almost four o’clock in the morning when she knocks on Ruby’s door.
What’s wrong, Ruby says with a mother’s instinct and immediate wakefulness.
You gonna have to sew me up.
Temple steps into the room, carrying a heavy green duffel that clatters noisily when she sets it down. Then she shuts the door behind her and lifts up her hand for Ruby to see.
Oh my God, what happened to you?
I got hurt.
We have to get Dr. Marcus.
We’re not gettin Doctor nobody. I already been to the clinic and hunted myself some lidocaine. I figure you got a sewing kit, and I just need your help on this—just a stitch or two—and then I’ll be on my way.
You tell me what happened to you.
I promise to give you the entire picture when I’m not bleedin out here on your carpet.
Ruby looks again at her hand.
Come here into the light, she says and brings Temple around and sits her on the side of the bed and lays her hand out on the tabletop under the lamp.
Here, Temple says, handing Ruby the lidocaine and the syringe.
How much? Ruby asks.
I don’t know. Just a little, I’m gonna need that hand.
Ruby injects it into the fleshy part of her palm just below the finger.
I don’t know why Dr. Marcus can’t do this.
Come morning the men around here ain’t gonna like me much. Sometimes they get curious notions of brotherhood, men do. You got a needle and thread?
Ruby goes to a drawer and sifts through it. What color? she asks, flustered.
I don’t guess it matters—it’s just gonna be blood black in a minute.
Oh, of course. It’s silly—I just can’t think straight.
Come on now, it’s just like mendin a sock.
Ruby gets the needle and thread, and Temple can feel her hand numbing. She reaches under the nightstand for one of the magazines piled there and puts it down to catch the blood. Then she takes a good look at her pinky finger. It’s gone just above the first knuckle, a clean cut through the bone that shows as a yellow twig poking through at the end. She uses her other hand to draw the skin up over the end of the bone and pinch it shut like a foreskin.
There, she says to Ruby. Now just run that thread through there a few times and tie it off. It’ll be okay.
Ruby does it and Temple looks away, staring at a picture of a vegetable garden Ruby has hanging over her bed. In the middle of the vegetable garden are three bunny rabbits and a girl wearing a bonnet. The pain comes sharp through the dullness of the lidocaine. She feels dizzy but clenches her teeth to keep from passing out. She pulls one of the Vicodins from her pocket and pops it in her mouth.
When it’s done, Temple undoes the elastic hair band from around her finger and watches to see what will happen. A little blood oozes out the seam at the end, but not much. She wraps her finger in gauze and tapes it.
You did some nice work, thanks.
I never did that before.
Well, I reckon I should—
But when she tries to stand, the room spins around her and she has trouble looking forward and her neck feels loose and squirmy, incapable of keeping her head arranged straight.
Are you all right? Ruby says, but her voice sounds like it’s coming through cotton. Like it’s coming through lollipops made of T-shirts. Like it’s coming through the cottontails of all the bunny rabbits in all the vegetable patches in the world.
Temple says, I’ll just sit a sec—
And that’s when the darkness comes and swallows her complete.
THE NEXT thing she knows, she’s lying under the covers in Ruby’s bed and there’s sunlight shining full and bright through the window. No one else is in the room.
Doggone it, she says and swings her feet to the ground. Her head still feels afloat on purple ether, and her eyes seem a step behind where she’s trying to look. She’ll have to move slowly. She stands and supports herself against the wall and makes it to the window and back to the bed—and for a few minutes she just walks back and forth between the window and the bed until her eyes start seeing straight and her head gets anchored to her body.